How to make money with land in 2023? The answer to the question is quite obvious: there are many ways to make cash and increase your income manifold if you possess or lease a few acres of land, a garden, own a few horses, chickens, goats, and other livestock. Read this article to find out more about land leasing, farming, and making money.
If everything around you collapses and it comes to homestead and survival, you may want to leave the big city for a less crowded place with hungry survivalists looting what is left of grocery stores. Returning to the natural economy can give you the surest position in the new world where all industries and digital business are gone. Surely, the land the first thing you need to settle your own homestead. You can buy an isolated piece of land or find a bugout location to turn into your survival homestead. The pieces of land that can match your expectations could be costly. If you don’t have a needed amount of money, you can get a loan. At that point, you should definitely consider the ways you could make your homestead profitable. The land you may own could be full of opportunities to reduce costs. You even can find ways to pay the bill for your homestead with its own resources. In this article, we’ve assembled most of the options to learn how you could make a lot of money from your land, namely, from your vacant land.
Ideas for Your Homestead
When you think about making your homestead profitable, there a whole bunch of ways to make money. The important thing is to choose the ones that will work for you. Surely you can combine most of them: it could even help you create a waste-free production. The text below contains short representations of the most common business ideas. We’ve tried to consider the most significant factors about these ideas and their pros and cons. Also, we are trying to make an article that will help you make a big next step in making money with your homestead.
Rent / Sell or Lease Vacant Land to Buyers
This section may be helpful if you are just preparing for your survival, but you’ve already bought a piece of raw land, or if you have a property that is too big for your own business. You may not want to work too much on your land, but the land itself can make money. It is a positive way to look at this situation. The other way is that you don’t want to bring other people to the location you plan to survive. The next step for the reader is to decide which way to make money you will choose and get started, and the text below describes the main categories of people who may be interested in renting or buying a part of your land.
Other Survivalists
Farmers
There no one in the world who admires good soil as farmers. You may find a piece of land with great agricultural potential even accidentally but can still give it into the right hands to make money. The only thing to start is to find out the market price of farmland in your region. For the next step, you’ll need to throw a cry, find a farmer, and negotiate a deal. There are some different ways to do so. You may charge a price for acres. In that case, you may need to find a surveyor to make sure. The other way is to have a percent of the profit from harvest. To make a reasonable decision, you should do your own research.
Dog Kenneling Services
This business idea requires great dedication to dogs. Also, it is a great way to make money too. If you have extra land, you can build a few kennel stalls and tell your neighbors about the services you offer. Many of them would definitely want to leave their pet with someone who cares about animals. Keep in mind that you can always offer special services like grooming or personally walk the dog that will make you more cash.
Hunters
If you have forests on your land and diverse wildlife, you can sell the rights to hunt on your land. There can be hunter organizations or individual hunters who would like to pay for it. You can always include special services and offers to help you make more money and save wildlife from distinction. You should always keep the relations between you and hunters strongly restricted and make decent rules. Wild animals should be protected from being eliminated.
Agriculture Income
Wild Plants and Mushrooms
Before you start cultivating your raw land, you should definitely get a closer look: if you have forested areas or swampy plains on your property – you should definitely look for edible mushrooms. There are plenty of types of wild edibles besides the shrooms. You can collect berries and wild fruits. Also, there’s plenty of various wild herbs. You can collect all of them by yourself, and you can hire people that can help you. Similar to cases where you rent out your land to hunters and farmers, you can do so with gatherers as well.
Gardening
Growing fruit trees and vegetables in your homestead could be very profitable even if you don’t plan to become a full-time farmer. You can always enlarge the number of things you grow for yourself and sell the rest at local farmers’ markets near your home. Even if the climate conditions are far from subtropical, you can always find some plant types that grow almost everywhere. We’ve made a shortlist of such plants in the block below:
Summer Vegetables:
- Asparagus
- Tomatoes
- Sweet potatoes
- Summer squash
- Amaranth
- Peppers
- Okra
- Eggplant
Winter Vegetables:
- Cabbage
- Spinach
- Carrots
- Collards
- Turnips
- Leeks
- Parsnips
- Swiss chard
Grapes for Wine/Alcohol
Holiday / Seasonal Opportunities
There are at least two trendy products for holidays that you can grow in your homestead. Pumpkins and Christmas trees become the essential product for special times each year. This business idea (whenever it is a pumpkin patch or a tree farm) will highly depend on how close your land is situated to a big city due to population density. Also, you’ll have to check the level of competition in your region. This could be a very profitable way to make money from your land if you do decent research. Remember that you don’t want a lot of people walking around your garden all the time. This method will limit these visits to one month when the sale takes place.
Livestock
Chickens
These birds were domesticated thousands of years ago, and since that time, they were a cornerstone of any homestead for many years. Chickens can give you meat, eggs, and feathers. There a lot of ways to treat your birds. You can build a chicken coop to control their movement, or you can let them walk free to fertilize your garden and cut down the weeds. The most significant thing to start your chicken business is eggs. You could sell them at farmers’ markets easily. To do so, you’ll need to adjust the egg flow to one egg per chicken per day.
Rabbits
If you don’t have much space for birds and cattle, you may want to raise rabbits. These little animals could become a crucial source of protein in survival circumstances. You can raise a big population of rabbits in a minimal space in a relatively short period of time. The well-known fact about them is that they breed easier and faster than most other farm animals. The significant condition to raise rabbits in your homestead is to make some hutches to hold them. Rabbits are very good at escaping, so you need to make sure that there no gaps or holes in them. This part could be relatively expensive, and you should keep that in mind before buying any rabbits. Also, rabbit meat is not so popular in our culture, and it will be harder to sell this type of meat than, for example, some beef, and you should keep that in mind if you want to make your homestead profitable.
Turkeys
Turkeys are a good supply of meat not only for the Thanksgiving table. Their meat is highly nutritious and dietary at the same time. If you think that raising turkeys is similar to breeding chickens, then you’ll have a surprise waiting for you. To start your turkey business, you’ll need to find a respectable breeder. Remember, your baby turkeys (or poult) are susceptible animals in the first weeks of their life. The better and healthier poult bought from any good breeder will have much more chances to survive. Contemporary ways of breeding exclude possible illnesses and congenital disabilities. Start to build a house for your turkeys when you already have your poult and disinfect it completely before you bring them in. The temperature needed for their nest in the first week is about 100 degrees in Fahrenheit and is about 37,7 degrees Celsius. You can find a 100-150 Watts lamp to support the needed level of heat. Slowly lower the heat every week, later on, if you’ve done everything right and your little turkeys survive the first week. If they make it to week 10, they will need no extra warmth. Use only fresh water and the finest food to feed your turkeys. They will be fully grown-ups when the fourteen-week period passes. The grown turkey should weigh about 17 to 22 kilograms. At this point, they are ready to be sold on the market or cooked for the table.
Beekeeping
Bees are essential to this world. They produce honey and other byproducts that bring sweetness and health to all of your family. There are many different races of bees. Some of them are better and productive in one climatic region. The others can make special types of honey. To start your own hives, you should consider buying these items:
- Smoker
- Frames and foundation
- Hive tool
- Hive body
- Inner/outer cover
- Hive stand
- Feeders
- Cotton/poly overalls with attached zipper veil
- Vented leather gloves
- Mesh helmet
- Queen excluder
These little insects could not only make sweet and nutritious honey. They could also happily pollinate your garden if the hives are located in a 250-meter range outside of it. As with the other types of animals, you should always be careful and sophisticated to get the result you needed.
Cattle
If your land is wast and you have enough resources, strength, and time you may want to have cattle. Before you start, the significant thing is that you got to choose what do you want your cattle for milk or meat. The difference here will be crucial. The cattle you use for milk are called dairy cattle. The ones you raise for meat are called beef cattle. Before you buy cows, you need to know that each animal needs about five acres of grazing land and about 18 gallons of drinking water. There a lot of things you should consider when you want to have a herd. Every cow eats from three to six percent of their own weight per day, and they definitely need extra vitamins and other nutrition. All of these things could be very expensive. Needed to mention that if grazing land runs low, you’ll have to buy extra food for your cattle. Also, you’ll need to build a decent fence about six feet high for your herd. You should already realize that this is hard work to do, and you should think twice before you choose this way to make money for your homestead.
Goats
Let’s get ourselves into a hypothetical situation where you want to have dairy cattle, but you don’t have enough space for it. In this case, you should closely look at the goats. Their diet is pretty similar to the cows, but they need more attention. Take care. They are very sensitive to poisonous types of plants.
Pigs
These animals are the most profitable investment when you want to produce meat. Pigs gain a lot of weight, and they could be fed with leftovers and table scraps. They eat almost everything, and there no need to graze them. The first step to start your pig farm is to build a pen. The pen should be relatively big: pigs need about 50 square feet per animal. You’ll need to divide the places where you feed them and where you give them water. Usually, they defecate near the place from where the water comes. You’ll need to know beforehand what to do with all that manure: try to sell it to the other farmers. Once the pig stopped to gain weight, it is time to take them to the market.
Tilapia Farming
Fish farming suits only specific climate zones. Also, you’ll need to have a pond or a lake on your land. Various species of tilapia could bring the harvest every half year. To buy fish that will allow you to start tilapia farming, go to the fishery or by live fish online. The next step is to build a cage in water to keep your tilapia inside. To learn more about fish farming, you should visit specific resources, like this one.
Byproducts of livestock farming
Eggs
When your chickens bring more eggs than you can eat, you could easily sell them on farmers’ markets. This a good income for your homestead. Remember that if the rooster mated some hen and it laid an egg, it becomes a day-old chick. You won’t get much money from selling this to people, but you can always breed them and sell little chicks to farmers.
Milk and Cheese
Every day, a dairy cow can produce about six gallons of milk. Even for a big family, it could be too much. You’ll need to buy a big refrigerator to store and then sell this milk to the buyers. You can always buy a milking machine to reduce the amount of labor. To milk a cow by hand, you’ll need a milking bucket and some soapy water to clean the teats of the animal before that. Slowly squeeze the base of two teats using your fingers and push the milk into the bucket. Continue this movement until you got all the milk out. The video below will explain this process graphically:
You can make cheese from the extra milk you have. This is an interesting process that acquires a lot of patience and creativity:
- Warm milk
- Add yogurt culture.
- Acidify the milk
- Add some coagulant
- Stir the vat of curds
- Dry out the curds
- Cover a bowl with a cheesecloth
- Pour the mixture into the bowl.
- Close the cloth around the cheese
- Remove any excess whey by squeezing.
When you’ve finished these steps, your cheese is ready to be salted and aged.
Stud services
If you have a male animal that is good for breeding, you can rent it to other farmers. You can always find a farmer near you who wants to make his herd better. Usually, when someone needs to use this kind of service, they rent a stud for a short period of time (about a week) and then return it to the owner. This is very convenient when this stud is a part of your beef cattle herd. You can double your income if you offer stud services and then take this stud to a market or a butcher.
Manure
Manure is one of the best fertilizers for raw land you can find. Every decent farmer definitely knows that fact and will be glad to buy some from you if they don’t have a provider. If you give it a try, there will definitely be one that is always looking for it.
Pelts
This byproduct could be a result of hunting or farming furry animals (like rabbits). Also, if you face wildlife predators and scavengers that can attack your herd, chicken, or other property of your homestead, you can collect pelts from them and take them to the market.
FAQ
Ways to make money off your land almost immediately?
Today, you can always use the advantage of any digital technology to make your homestead profitable. There an enormous amount of options that are only limited by your fantasy and supposed profit potential. You can sell plant seeds online, offer storage room, rent plots, or start blogging about your new farm already! Tell the stories someone else could be interested in. Try to predict what people need in the long term.
How to earn money from vacant land?
You can always sell a part of the land you don’t use for your homestead. You can also use free space to place things that are too big for other environments, like a solar farm, horse stables, and boat storage. The long term rental of these things can bring more money.
How to make money by buying land: Subdividing?
Instead of renting out your entirely, you should consider subdividing. You can divide your property between making different lots and boosting profits per acre. This method could help you to maximize this resource. Make sure to keep one plot for yourself.
Where our farm animals come from?
Some animals (like sheep) were domesticated more than ten thousand years ago. After that, farming of animals became one of the main occupations for people until the modern age.
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